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Crossroads of the Marine Corps

New Mentor Match Service will make it easier to find a mentor

7 Apr 2016 | Adele Uphaus-Conner Marine Corps Base Quantico

Mentoring a colleague feels like teaching your child to ride a bike, said Tom Sipe, associate director for Manpower and Reserve Affairs’ Civilian Workforce Planning and Development.

“You don’t enjoy watching them fall, but you enjoy watching them ride,” Sipe said. “Like everyone else I’m proud of my accomplishments, but what makes me more proud is when I teach someone to do something and they can do it on their own.”

Sipe said he knows of many in the leadership ranks who would like to be mentors but don’t know how to find mentees. The same is true of employees looking for a mentor.

“It may be stressful for employees to go into each office asking ‘will you be my mentor?’?” he explained.

Now, there’s a program that will make it easier and less awkward for mentors and mentees to find each other. Called Mentor Match Services (MMS), it’s a module that’s been added to the Total Workforce Management System (TWMS). It allows civilian employees to register as mentors and mentees, filling out their areas of expertise and the specific skills they’d like to improve. The service will identify matches based on geographic location, job description, strengths, and areas of interest.

MMS has been in development for about a year, Sipe said. It’s meant to be simple and easy to use; registration should take less than five minutes. And the service was inexpensive to create, costing pennies per employee when it is opened up to the entire Department of the Navy.

“The most cost-efficient way to train employees is to have them train each other,” Sipe said. “It’s a great way to develop the workforce.”

Mentors get the benefit of knowing that they are growing the Marine Corps mission capability by sharing their knowledge and expertise. Mentees can get general help with their career development or specific help in achieving a certain goal or skill set.

Sipe said that a mentoring relationship doesn’t have to be a senior employee mentoring a junior. Peers can mentor each other or a junior can mentor a senior.

“It just has to be someone who has the skills you’re interested in acquiring,” he explained. “There are plenty of millennials who know a whole lot more about technology and social media than me. I need those skills.”

Mentoring relationships that are entered into through MMS can be as formal or informal as the two parties want and can last for three months or up to a year — and can even keep going beyond that.

To help you understand mentoring roles and responsibilities, MMS requires you to take a short course prior to registering in the MMS. An online tutorial for using MMS is available at https://www.manpower.usmc.mil/TWMS.

During the month of March, a campaign called “A Few Good Mentors” was in place to encourage people to sign up as mentors so that there will be a directory in place when the service opened to both mentors and mentees April 4. Sipe said that “a couple hundred” mentors registered during this time.

Sipe said that he’d like to see every employee register with MMS.

“If you don’t think you have special skills to share, register as a mentee — or re-evaluate yourself,” he said. “You probably have a level of skill you don’t realize. Everybody has something to share.”

To sign up for MMS, civilians should go their TWMS self-service account, located at https://MyTWMS.navy.mil.

— Writer: auphausconner@quanticosentryonline.com

Marine Corps Base Quantico